


by their own suggestions fell

by irrelevant



Category: Prometheus (2012)
Genre: Elizabeth and David's fucked up yet excellent adventure, Gen, I am as one with the creepy, Other, Wordcount: 10.000-30.000, because i'm weird that way, creepy humor, oh god what is wrong with me, possible squick factor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-06
Updated: 2012-10-07
Packaged: 2017-11-15 19:01:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/530605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irrelevant/pseuds/irrelevant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first sort by their own suggestions fell,<br/>Self-tempted, self-depraved: man falls deceived<br/>By the other first: man therefore shall find grace,<br/>The other none</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. she

**Author's Note:**

>   
> 
> 
>  
> 
> for the robotbigbang on lj. thanks to Q, as always, and to Shibara for her gorgeously perfectly creepy artistic interpretation. she's awesome, so [go give her some love](http://shibara-ffnet.livejournal.com/37511.html).  
> 

Bodiless, zipped up in a bag, he must still know they've crossed over. He’s still functional. He can still speak and hear and see. He can still… feel? Does that word apply? Is see the right word for what his eyes are – are his eyes even eyes? (Made by humans but not human what is he? It.)

Does he see or do his sensors transfer recorded information to his processing centres where it’s collated and disseminated into zeros and ones and then stored forever in his memory cells? Is that close to what her human eyes do, what they’re doing now? How close are his sensations to hers?

She would have known, even stuck in a bag. She could have closed her eyes and felt the change in terrain beneath the wheels; she'd like to be able to close her eyes but she can't. She has to see to drive and she was driving with her eyes open when she saw the ports up ahead, three times the height of the Prometheus’ hanger doors, and she didn’t stop. She drove the ATV into the cavernous, empty loading bay, and now she’s slowing, she has to go slower, slow down because she needs to… park. Another everyday word she can’t use to make sense of a situation so far removed from her experience. Parking is what you do outside of a shop or in a garage. You park your car in the driveway of your house. You don’t park anything so obviously built by humans in a space so completely alien to humanity, you stop your vehicle and then you hope for the best.

She pushes down on the brake, she stops the ATV and then she stops; she stays in her seat and the steering mechanism is the right shape, the right hardness under her fingers. The seat back is nonexistent; it digs into her lower back when she leans, but there’s foam padding of a sort and the thin cushion gives a bit under her weight (humans made this).

Around her there is no give and nothing of humanity but what she’s brought with her. Above her the bulkheads curve in on each other like the black ribs of a dead leviathan and that’s, it’s really not funny. Ironic. She’ll be more than three days and three nights in the belly of this monster. She could probably find out how many if she wanted. She has another monster along to translate, that’s why she brought him, although she’s already regretting bringing more of him than she can fit in a duffle bag.

Even with the winch she felt something sharp and fearful snap inside of her when she lowered his body. She won’t be able to do anything like that again after the adrenaline crash hits and she isn’t going to try. She won’t exchange her body for his; it’s what she has to work with. Like him, she’s now a tool, but she’s her own tool. She won’t be used by anyone else.

She’s learning how to use. She’s had some very good teachers. She pushes the bag’s folds away from one of those teachers’ faces (humans made _him_ ) and says, ‘Tell me how to do this.’

His voice is slow, halting. He’s muffled by the bag and malfunctioning circuitry, but his instructions are clear and concise. Her stomach jerks again of its own accord when she thinks of touching anything they made, but she has her gloves. She can feel Dad’s cross pressing into her chest. Charlie’s ring is wrapped around her finger.

She has lied and been lied to, she has wished ill and done violence. She can do this.

The grooves on the deck don’t quite match up with the ATV’s shape, but again, here, she’s using what she has to work with, not what she refuses to let herself wish for. She manoeuvres the ATV into the centre of six slits arranged in a circular pattern and then she walks to the nearest black rib and holds his head up so he can see the controls mounted into it.

He says, ‘Yes,’ when she says, ‘This one?’ and she presses down on the indent and doesn’t think about alien doors opening and closing under the press of his fingers. She leaves the ATV clamped in place by milky white, membranous webs that feel like living leather and look like (tentacles snapping out to drag her back no take have him instead) they’re breathing; she leaves his body strapped to the seat. It hurts to move herself, much less extra weight, and she’s taking only what she can see herself needing with her to the bridge.

A med kit, six nutrient tubes and a third of the water pouches join the combination analgesic/antibiotic single shots in the spare duffle bag. She hefts it gingerly, gauging the weight against the drag on her staples. When nothing pops she slings the bag with his head over the shoulder she landed on when she jumped from the lifeboat and limps toward the nearest open doorway.

 

In his bag, on the way to the bridge and after she sets him down beside the chair, David is silent.

He doesn’t ask after his body. He doesn’t offer any information unless she asks for it. She doesn’t speak to him unless she has to. The dynamic duo, she thinks, and instead of laughing she bites the inside of her cheek until she feels a piece of herself separate from the rest, until her tongue gets distracted by the loose flap of skin and the iron tang beneath it and her eyes get distracted by white ovoid shapes that are just as inhuman as white, breathing webs. She moves his bagged head to the console, she _uses_ him to cover as many white shapes as she can, and she asks him how to save their lives.

Lives, plural, because he’s made it obvious that he holds his existence in as high or higher regard than she holds hers. She doesn’t want to compare herself to him. She didn’t set out to kill, she didn’t mean – but did he? Did he want to or did he have to? Her kind created his kind, built a race of slaves from the ground up. The engineers created her kind only to destroy them, and his eyes are so full of light. There’s light inside of them.

It’s better not to look at him. It’s easier to ask him, Is this the right musical note? Did I stroke the right pressure point correctly, am I doing any of this right? Am I going to press the wrong thing and blow us up?

(Easier to think about the questions than it is to let herself see what her hands are doing.)

He responds, low and slightly garbled, saying _yes_ and _yes_ and _some_ and _probably_.

The last response is silent. She hears it in her head, or she… thinks she does. (He watched her dreams. Can he read her mind?)

The chrono in her suit thinks (believes) it’s day three when he tells her it’s safe to engage FTL flight. She does everything he tells her (the flute), she does everything perfectly (oh, the orrery), and when she’s done, when his mouth is empty of instructions—when he has nothing left that she can use—she puts him back in the bag and zips it shut. She puts the closed bag on the deck and sits down next to it.

The console hums against her skin. It feels cool and slightly clammy. She closes her eyes for a moment. Just a moment.

 

Dad says, ‘Because they don’t want us,’ and hands her the cross.

She says, ‘Why not?’ but he only smiles. He puts the engineer’s flute to his mouth and plays and his head explodes, spraying her with green filth that burns and wiggles against her skin like it’s trying to find a way inside her pores.

She flails like she used to at flies in the summer, slapping at her skin and screaming. She screams and screams, she can’t stop, and David is holding her up by her arms, holding her still so that she can’t kill the green things burrowing into her.

He’s speaking to her, but she can’t hear him over the sound of her own screams. His voice is muffled and indifferent, and his smile looks like someone else smiled it first and then stuck it on his face. Like drawing a mustache and horns on Michelangelo’s David, only this David isn’t a work of art. He’s not even real.

He looks real enough. His eyes are wide and strange. They don’t fit his smile any more than his smile fits his face, and she needs, desperately, to hear what he’s saying. She needs to stop screaming because he needs her to do something and she, she needs to

‘Wake up, please. Dr Shaw, wake up.’

It’s very dark behind her closed eyelids. The bridge is almost as dark when she gets them open. It takes a while. They’re crusted together, tear gummed and salt thick, and she pries them apart and stares up at the overhead and she doesn’t, she does not remember.

She says, ‘David,’ and he says, ‘Dr Shaw?’ and she remembers (it’s okay, safe to remember this) she remembers why his voice is muffled. She turns onto her side and looks at the bag. It’s not too far away. If she reaches – like that-

Her fingers catch on the edge and she drags it toward her. She doesn’t unzip it. She curls in until she feels the strain in her abdomen beneath the meds, until the material is rough against her forehead. She says, ‘Doesn’t this thing have any windows?’  
She swallows and her throat clicks and she thinks about how far of a crawl it is to the water pouches and the hypos and the med kit, and how much energy she’ll have to expend to get to them.

David says, ‘I don’t know.’

She nods and the bag’s rough fabric scratches her skin. She swallows again. It hurts. ‘Thank you,’ she tells him.

He says, ‘It was my pleasure.’

 

She lives inside of her suit, bathing in her own sweat, and she hurts. These are the constants in her life, the only parts of it that make sense. She cut herself open, stapled herself back together, and her patchwork result is something more painful than Charlie’s death, more than Dad’s, more even than the realisation that she loves herself more than she did them, together or separately.

Her guts move every time she moves, but not with her. They move around inside of her, in spite of her. She’s more aware of her insides now than she ever was before, and she wants them to stop living (dying) independently of her so that she can go back to being ignorant of them.

(She wants to be ignorant of him where he’s trapped twice, inside the bag and in the hold.)

She tries to space the injections out. Tries to save them for whenever she can’t think through the pain, when all she can do is lay her forehead on the deck and wish for water, a blue and green and white planet full of it, but she’s running out of water pouches and her mind is disappearing into fire and the injections are the only thing that helps.

Sometimes, when the latest one has taken hold and her mind is cool again for a small while, she thinks she doesn’t recognise herself anymore. She doesn’t recognise the woman who would leave anyone, robot or not, closed up inside a bag for any reason or length of time. The woman who sits with her back to the console and watches the entrance to the bridge, waiting to see what comes through it; the woman who lets her suit process her waste instead of finding wash water and clean clothes and a head; that woman isn’t anyone she knows.

Elizabeth Shaw is still thinking, still trying to be heard, but this new person, whoever she is, doesn’t seem to have any trouble ignoring her. And when she thinks – when she can think – she thinks she’s glad of it.

She touches the shape of the cross beneath her suit and she’s glad that Dad’s dead, that he can’t see what she’s becoming. She moves her thumb back and forth over the smooth head of Charlie’s ring and she can’t remember what colour his eyes were before they were black and red and coming apart.

That’s how her gut feels now, like it’s coming apart in black surges, red spiking up behind her eyes and green, green noise filling in the spaces between Elizabeth’s nonsense words.

She’s aware, vaguely, of noises that don’t come from inside her head or her gut. Sometimes she understands them; sometimes she misunderstands on purpose, but mostly she doesn’t hear him clearly enough for it to matter. She’s louder inside her head than he is outside of it and she can put her hands over her ears if Elizabeth decides to be quiet or the pain stops sounding red.

 

‘I can hear your eyes,’ she tells David solemnly, and Charlie laughs.

He says, ‘He’s just a synth, babe, don’t confuse him,’ and she looks up at David and asks him, ‘Don’t you understand, then?’

‘No, sorry.’ He sounds regretful, even though she knows he isn’t, really. He isn’t able to be. ‘I’m programmed to find meaning in abstract images, but I am unable to interpret them on a personal level.’

She tries to tell him, ‘It’s the colour, I can hear your colour,’ but he only blinks and looks as regretful as his program allows him to look.

Charlie says, ‘What are you on and where can I get some?’ He puts his arm around her waist and she tries not to flinch. ‘Paradises to see, angels to do, and sorry, people with souls only invited,’ he tells David. He’s laughing again (he’s always laughing at something her everything) and she remembers how (angry) annoyed that used to make her.

She says, ‘You shouldn’t say things like that.’ She says it to him but also to herself, she reminds herself, and he grins.

‘Why not?’ he says. ‘What’s he gonna do, punch me? Hey Pinocchio, what’s the first law of robotics?’

David blinks again and says, ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’

Charlie says, ‘There, you see, Ellie? He can’t hurt us.’

She thinks _oh yes he can_. She remembers how much she hurt and she remembers that he wouldn’t help her. She remembers how surprised she was by how much his refusal hurt her.

‘Those laws are fictional,’ David says to Charlie. ‘In reality, there are no laws enacted that would prevent a synthetic from being programmed to harm a human. Synthetics are often used for wartime and military purposes,’ he adds, and this, this is when and how it happens. It’s where Charlie bursts into flame, collapses into a pile of writhing broken DNA.

Except that he doesn’t. He throws up his hands and says, ‘You know what, I give up. You guys pick the weirdest times to discuss the weirdest shit, and I am going to need a lot of beer if I’m going to have to listen to this.’ He’s already walking away, calling back to them, ‘You want one, Ells? Speak now or forever hold your peace. I’d offer you one, Dave, but we both know you’re not in a position to appreciate it.’

She can hear him leaving her, but she can’t turn and watch him go. She can’t look back or she’ll turn into a pillar of salt.

‘Dr Shaw,’ David says. He sounds so urgent, so sad, but that’s impossible. He can only understand emotions, not feel them.

And how true is that? Weyland told them that, and she shouldn’t have believed anything that came out of his mouth (just like his _son_ ). Maybe it’s the other way round. He experiences, feels something and it confuses him. He probably understands it no better than humans understand their own emotions – humans aren’t very good at that. Psychology and psychiatry would be dead fields otherwise, and humans made him in their image.

How long did it take the first humans to understand what it was they were feeling, or that they felt anything at all? David’s brain is superior. He makes connections frighteningly fast. How much faster would he make this one?

It’s from a film I like.

Not a film he was given to watch or a film Mr Weyland liked. A film he, David, liked.

Faster. So much faster than it takes her to do anything. She knows – it’s like knowing the blue of his eyes is a soft clear note. His grey uniform sounds sharply crisp. She’d play it for him but she’s lost her flute.

‘Dr Shaw,’ he says. ‘Elizabeth.’

Her lips are wet. David is crying and her lips are wet. She wants to ask him why he’s crying but his tears are coming too fast, drenching her cheeks and stinging her eyes. She closes her mouth to keep them out, tries to blink them away and can’t. She can’t because her right cheek is stuck to the deck with her own saliva and snot, and so is her right eyelid. Her left eyelid is crusted shut and she has to rub the crust away before it will open.

‘Elizabeth,’ says David’s muffled voice. ‘Elizabeth. Elizabeth. Dr Shaw. Elizabeth,’ he says, monotone and repetitive, as though he’s been saying her name for a long time and has every intention of going on indefinitely.

She answers him to stop the sound of him. Well, she tries. It’s been… long. A long time since she used her voice. She’s almost forgot how, and her throat is too dry for sound. But David is still talking and for some reason her head is quiet. If she wants to shut him up she needs to talk to him. She swallows, trying for some of the saliva that seems to have all dripped down her chin, and pokes around inside the burnt-out nooks and crannies of Elizabeth’s head, looking for her lost words.

Her first attempt ends in a coughing fit. Her second produces sharp pressure in her nasal passages, squeezes tears from the corners of her eyes. They drip down her face into her mouth, and they’re like David’s in that they’re bitter, but it’s a saline bitterness, not silicone. She can safely swallow them and they’ll wet her throat enough for her to croak, ‘I’m here.’

The litany of her name gives way to silence.

‘Dr Shaw,’ David says. ‘I was. Afraid you were unwell.’

Hysteria lives in her chest, but she doesn’t have to let it burst out. She can contain it, contain herself, with both hands if necessary. ‘What made you think that?’ she says, gritting her teeth as she pushes herself up, bracing her hands against the deck. She needs both of them to stay upright because there’s nothing between her ears but vertigo and now that she doesn’t need it her mouth is full of sour saliva. Nausea claws at her belly; it clings to her oesophagus and hovers at the back of her throat, waiting for her to move again.

‘You spoke my name, but when I attempted to respond, your replies were unrelated. You were dreaming?’

Yes and yes and God, she never wants to move again. Beneath the tough skin of her suit her knees are raw meat and her abdomen is ripe flesh: a swollen, liquid ache. If she pushed down on it, her juices would leak out through her pores, filling her suit to overflowing.

She’s surrounded by empty water pouches and injectors. His bag is just beyond her reach. She blinks sweat and tears out of her eyes and slaps her hands down one after the other, slick palms dragging rough over the deck, catching on ridges and skidding across the dips.

He says, ‘Elizabeth?’

‘Just a minute,’ she pants. She tosses her hair back out of her face and she feels the wet slap of it on her neck, hears the spatter of her sweat against the deck as she looks up at the bag. She’s almost there. One more slippery pull, her hands scrabbling wetly for purchase and she’s falling forward.

She cries out more out of feared than actual pain; she catches herself on her stinging, sweating palms before the rest of her finishes landing, and David is speaking again, but her blood is loud in her temples, loud enough to drown him out. She leans over his bag on her hands and knees and gasps her relief out in sobs that twist through her abdomen in rhythmic, almost menstrual clenches.

They leave her shaking and nauseous, but the position is the most comfortable she’s found for her abdomen, and she stays in her arch. Positioning the bag between her hands, she pulls the zip open with her teeth.

‘Thank you,’ David says, still muffled, though not as badly as before.

She pushes the sides of the bag away, but she can’t see him clearly. She tries lifting him by his hair, tugging on it until her belly convulses and so does she. When the nausea goes away again, she opens her eyes. He’s half in, half out of the bag. She can see his eyes. She tells him, ‘I think there’s something wrong.’ She says, ‘I think what’s wrong, I think it’s me.’

His eyes go distant, looking through her. He’s scanning her. She watches his eyes change color, green flecked with gold and red, and thinks _a robot, he’s a robot, he can’t be infected by that kind of thing_.

His voice cuts through her spiraling panic. ‘Yes.’ He looks into her eyes as he tells her, ‘I’m sorry.’

She says, no, no you aren’t, you’re glad, and she says, if I, if you, would you. Will you.

He says, ‘If I can. I’m truly sorry, Dr Shaw.’

She says, ‘Liar, oh God, I can’t believe any of them believed you,’ and she laughs at him, at herself, at all of them until she can’t breathe, until she splits open down all her seams and dissolves into red black green.

 

Every time she tries to stand she sees purple and blue. The third time she tries she thinks, that’s interesting, no red and green, but after the blue there is black, a lot of it. There’s a lot of nothing.

David calls her back to consciousness the same way he’s done every other time. She has a bump on the back of her head and twin aches in her temples and they seem to throb in time with him chanting her name. She tells him to shut up then she stuffs her last water pouch into the bag with him, wraps its handles round her wrist, and crawls.

Time folds around her. It compresses her into tight knots of muscle, torn pieces of aching flesh. She’s gasping, sweat stinging her eyes and pooling at the neck of her suit, and she’s

She blinks the color away and the masked statue above bends down and she hears her panic speed her pulse, she cradles her sour fear in her mouth and blinks again. The statue stands as it’s stood for millennia. She’s barely through the port.

She’s climbed in the Andes more than once and loved it. She loved the strain in her muscles at the end of long days, dust thick and sweat-caked in her hair and throat. Now she can’t crawl a few metres without needing to rest, but this, it’s not Chile. It’s not even the Prometheus. It’s a ship built for the mental and physical comfort of nine foot tall beings and she is their creation, crawling small and insignificant through another of their creations on her hands and knees. Crawling, listening to the labored sound of her own breathing. Her pulse is too loud in her ears; it seems to ricochet from her throat to the dark walls then back into her head in a continuous reverberation, and she is more than uncomfortable: she is afraid.

She drags herself past sealed, slab-like doors and she imagines them opening. She imagines the things that would reach out of them for her. She watches them from the corners of her watering eyes, staring and crawling until one door opens and something reaches and she screams and she opens her eyes, her scream a fast fading echo down the corridor.

Maybe that echo is in her mind as well. Her head feels disconnected from her body and she doesn’t know where she is or how far she’s come and it’s been

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know how long since she last heard him say anything.

Maybe she should unhook the bag from her wrist for a while. She should pace herself, rest before she passes out again, but her chrono is too far away from her down at the end of her arm. She starts counting doors instead. When there are no doors she counts the raised ribs dividing the walls into sections. They’re easy to keep track of; she can turn her head either way and see them without having to raise her head. Every third door or fourth rib, she stops.

She rests her intolerable weight, all the pressure in her abdomen propped up by her braced arms and crooked elbows. She lays her cheek on the deck, ‘And on the seventh day he rested.’

‘If you need to sleep, I can wake you later.’

The bag is lying on its side; the handles are dug into her wrist where they’re still looped around it; it hurts, but so does everything else; that’s probably why she didn’t notice until now. She hadn’t noticed the bag was unzipped, either, but she can see a few strands of blond hair and the line of his cheek. ‘All right,’ she says, and closes her eyes.

 

She chokes, coughing and rolling over onto her side fast enough to prevent herself from drowning in her own blood. She spits twice, human red spattering engineer black, but there’s more. Her mouth is full of it, drool thick and slick and leaking at the corners. She must’ve bitten her tongue when she passed out.

‘Dr Shaw?’

She spits again. ‘Don’t call me that.’ She wants to roll onto her back but if she does she might not be able to get up again. She wonders how many staples she has left. How many are loose in the suit, swimming free in her belly?

‘It’s your name,’ David says. It sounds like a question. She could ignore it, ignore him. She doesn’t owe him anything, but neither does he owe her anything. He got her off the planet; she brought him along. That deal is done. Now there’s a new deal growing between them, its parameters still nebulous and unformed. There has to be a new deal because she still wants to live.

‘Dr Shaw was my mother,’ she says once she’s spat again. ‘She’s dead.’

He’s quiet. Then he says, ‘You’re not.’

‘Not yet.’ She can’t stay down here; if she does she’ll never get up again. She says, ‘I’m just Shaw,’ and rolls up onto her knees and then she waits for the deck to start behaving like a deck again. ‘David.’ God, it’s a hot dart through her belly, a burst of ultraviolet going off light behind her left eye, and that’s just when she speaks. ‘I could call you something else.’

The throbbing behind her eyes dies down into the usual dull ache. ‘Thank you for offering,’ David says. ‘I’m fine.’

Laughing hurts everything—her head and her mouth, her eyes and her belly—but it was such a bloody human thing to say. People ask how you’re doing but they don’t really want to know. They want you to tell them you’re fine so you can all move on.

They want to get on with their day and remember you as being all right; they don’t want to know for sure one way or another.

‘You’re not,’ she says. ‘I’m not. None of this is fine.’ If she turns not too far to the right she can see his outline without making her head start up again. She’s going to have to drink some more water soon; there isn’t much left. ‘You’ve got, you have a lot of languages. Don’t you? In your memory?’

‘Yes.’

The blood in her mouth is mostly gone. She can feel the place where she bit her tongue now, but it’s a small pain, secondary to the others. Her tongue feels clumsy in her mouth, though, swollen and dehydrated. It makes it harder to push the words out, but maybe that’s all right. She doesn’t have many words left to waste, and maybe that’s why she’s asking, ‘What about books?’ She needs someone else’s words now.

Her mind could be putting hesitation into his tone, but she’s not imagining the long pause between her question and his reply. Eventually he says, ‘Is there one in particular you’re interested in?’

Her smile stretches her dry skin too tight; her lip cracks and she tastes blood. ‘ _The_ book, David.’

‘Ah. Chapter and verse?’

‘Anything,’ she says. ‘You choose.’ Because she’s curious but also because she’s made too many choices, too quickly; she doesn’t want to make any more decisions for a while, not even one this small.

David says, ‘Very well. In the land of Ur,’ he says, ‘there was a man named Job, and that man was blameless, upright, fearing God and turning from evil,’ and she bleeds and she hurts and she swallows, tasting her own salt.

‘No boils yet.’ She can’t remember cursing His name. She can’t remember if she’s been crawling for a few hours or a few days.

He says, ‘Do you believe God’s actions toward this man were justified?’

Her father asked her the same question, with dialectic intentions. She thinks David just wants to know what she believes.

She says, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does.’

 

Vickers was right. They were all right, everyone but her. She was in the wrong, so much so that even now she can’t allow herself to fully understand how much. She questioned wrongly and too deeply. She plucked the fruit and ate and now she is reaping what she sowed, abandoned, cast down, an inhuman being and his sword of fire standing between her and everything she’s always believed to be true.

Behind her the void slithers in, chitinous and hungry. She hears it uncoil, preparing to wrap her round and pull her the rest of the way down into the pit, and she throws herself forward, away from it. Desperate, she crawls.

Hands and knees, she is suppliant here; her forehead hurts, pressed down into gritty dirt. The grey hem of his uniform trousers is soft under her raw fingers.

Please let me go, let me go back in. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll be good this time.

‘Apologies,’ he says. ‘You must know that I can’t.’ His voice is gentle, regretful. His eyes are twin reflections of the fiery sword he carries.

‘Please,’ she says again. Please.

She lifts her head and looks at him and with his hand he reaches down. With her hand, she reaches up.

He lifts her and holds her there, steady and unmoving with only his hand. He says, ‘I have no wish to cause harm to you, Elizabeth,’ and then he swings his other hand down. He plunges his sword into her belly and she screams, screams oh God my God why has thou why. He shouts back, shouts her name until she has to shout again, until they’re shouting together and only her voice grows hoarse. Only her throat hurts.

Of the two of them, only she has a throat left to hurt.

Her face is pressed against the bag and she can feel the shape of him through it: her nose nudges one inhumanly high cheekbone.

He says ‘Elizabeth,’ and she doesn’t mind.

She says, gasps, ‘Psalm twenty-three.’ Click-click-click, something’s not processing right and it’s too loud for this empty corridor. He’s too quiet underneath his own sound. She imagines him searching his files, turning bright bits of information over with what passes for his mind until he has the one he needs.

When he looked at her with artificial, flame-shadowed eyes, all she saw was light.

He says, ‘The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.’

 

His singing voice is a pleasant tenor and coming back to consciousness with someone else’s words coming out of his mouth, even if his delivery isn’t perfect, is a thousand times better than having him put her name on repeat and hit play. And the flawed delivery isn’t really his fault. Every few sentences his voice stutters over a word, not because he doesn’t know what he’s trying to say or how to say it; he stutters because some connection isn’t being met. Something is very wrong with him.

Something is very wrong with both of them. Some things. His voice is the least of them.

‘I haven’t heard that for – it’s been a long time,’ she says, and his voice breaks off. She says, ‘I didn’t know you could sing.’

He says, ‘I can do almost anything that is asked of me.’ His speaking voice is in worse shape than his singing voice; it jumps, shivers around ending consonants and beginning vowels like a stroke victim’s slur. ‘Are you feeling better?’

‘I.’ It hurts less to lie on her side facing his bag and it’s better to keep him close. She’s not sure she’d wake up again if he wasn’t there to wake her.

Laying a careful hand on her abdomen, she allows herself to feel what she’s feeling. She wonders how many more staples have popped out, become lost between her skin and the suit. ‘I’ve been better,’ she says honestly. Her head is a hollow ache and her stomach has come completely loose inside of her; she can feel it liquefying under her fingers. She says, ‘I think I’m going to die.’

He says, ‘According to your God, everything does.’

His voice is what she has left. That was as true on the bridge as it is here. The difference is, she can’t hate him for it anymore.

She breathes in and out, in through her nose and out of her mouth, until everything evens out inside of her and there’s nothing left to do but make everything uneven again. She doesn’t give herself time for anticipation—that’ll just make it worse. She rolls up onto her hands and knees and starts crawling.

 

‘David,’ she says, pulling at the bag until his face is free of its folds, ‘is it – are we?’

She saw her mother a little while ago, standing in the middle of a corridor talking to the aunt she left back on earth. She can’t trust her eyes and brain anymore and she wouldn’t trust him with anyone’s life, but she trusts him to get her to his body. She trusts him to tell her if she’s in the right place.

‘This is it?’ she asks, and he says, ‘Yes.’ He says, ‘On your left,’ and she lifts her head and something huge and wet and merciless surges behind her eyes up into her throat. The loading bay is as massive as she remembers and the ATV is half a world away but she can see it; she can see an end. She can’t see what it’s going to be but it’s there and so is his body and she’s crawling and there’s her end, one she can put a name to: soon she won’t have to crawl anymore.

David is talking one long garbled stream of fact. Tools are under the rear compartment of the ATV and in a sealed pouch in his suit. She’ll have to work on him where his body is, strapped into the back of the vehicle; the straps will hold him still and she couldn’t move him if she wanted to.

She lets him talk; doesn’t interrupt; doesn’t really listen. He’ll repeat himself (he does when she asks him to) and the deck needs her attention more than he does. It’s full of inconsistencies, rough and uneven and she isn’t very steady. Inevitably her hand slips, wrenching her sideways. Her belly convulses and she chokes on her scream, but she throws out her arm in time and the deck scrapes layers of skin off of her palm instead of punching her in the gut. Her head drops and her hair falls down into her face, slapping wetly at her cheeks. Her sweat is melt water, seeping out of her pores and dripping down her face to the deck; she hears it hit and she hears her own uneven breathing, the high hitch of it that sounds like a whimper.

She hears him say her name.

‘Shut up.’ Her throat is so dry. How can her face be wet when her tongue is cracking, crumbling away inside of her mouth? It hurts to say, ‘Until I get there, until then just shut up.’

For once, he listens to her. She gets back up on her palms, up on her knees that must be there even if she can’t feel them. She moves and she wishes he hadn’t listened. His silence isn’t so loud that she can’t hear so very many things she’d rather not.

 

Her fingers bump the tread, jolting her hand back to life. If she couldn’t feel the sting she wouldn’t believe it. ‘H-here,’ she says, and she digs her nails into hard rubber, she scrapes and claws herself upward, up, she still has this little way to go.

The back of her throat tastes like tarmac and someone is sobbing, choking, and her chest is caving in. Her boot catches on the step and she tips forward over his strapped in body and God, God, God she’s going to die right here, spilled half over his body, her guts spilled out inside of her suit, her left boot jammed at an awkwardly right angle into the space between the step and the frame.

He’s between her and his body, jammed against her hip and she has to think about this. She has to think her hands into unknitting themselves from the bag and his uniform and make them pull him the rest of the way out.

‘Your hands,’ he says, and she lets go of him, lets him fall onto his own lap and holds her left hand up. She holds it close to her face because sometimes she can’t focus when things are too far away.

Black with millennia worth of grit from the deck, skin scraped red and raw. Two of her nails are gone; the rest are worn bloody. She looks down at his body. She looks at him. They’re not the same thing.

‘Tell me what to do.’

He says, ‘I’m sorry that I’m unable help you more than this,’ and she doesn’t shake her head, doesn’t tell him it’s okay. It’s not okay and they aren’t and she can’t they can’t she isn’t

Even braced against the step her twisted ankle wobbles under her. She grabs onto his shoulders to keep her balance. They’re bare, she had to pull his suit down to see what she was fixing, and her hands slip-slide over his skin before she finds a grip that works and steadies herself, trying for a balance she doesn’t feel.

In the end she stands on her good leg, her other knee braced on his lap. She lifts his head by his hair, lines it up with his spine and looks into his eyes. ‘There?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do I—’

‘Push down. As hard as you can.’

It’s not very. Not enough to fix him in place, put him back together, not for all the king’s horses or men. It’s more than enough to make her scream. The skin of his throat and chest is slick with her sweat; his shoulder glistens where her forehead was briefly pressed against it and his arms hang useless at his sides. He says, ‘Shaw,’ and his voice jumps and jerks, stumbles off into mechanical static.

‘Just… moment.’ She can do this. She didn’t want to, wasn’t going to, but now that she has to she will.

She pushes and screams and something snaps apart inside of her at the same time something else snaps into place outside of her. She tastes iron, thick and cloying, and she slumps into him and she can see his eyes watching her while his body doesn’t move and doesn’t move because it can’t.

 

She tries. She tries to straddle him, tries to make her hands work the tools and her body stay upright but she can’t.

‘Perhaps if you could lie down?’ he says, and she swallows red iron and says, ‘Can’t, no room.’

He says, ‘I don’t believe it would be difficult to get us down. If you think you can bear the impact.’

She swallows, swallows and pants, ‘You’ve no idea what I can bear,’ and she lifts her head, searching for the strap release.

It’s difficult, no it’s just _hard_ to press the release hard enough free him from the straps. It’s stupidly easy to anchor her hands in his uniform, let her own unbalance take her and fall down with him onto the deck. She lands on top of him and her lungs are flat and empty and she has no air but she still has to bite her lip to keep the scream in, has to blink and blink until her eyes stop stinging. She lets momentum roll her off him onto her side and they’re side by side, her hand still clutching his suit and the wand.

Her chest and everything in it is moving too fast. His isn’t moving at all.

‘Ok?’ she croaks.

‘Presumably.’

She says, ‘I hate the way you say that.’ She wipes her eyes clear with the back of her hand then she flattens her palms on the deck and on his chest and pushes herself up.

 

‘One arm,’ he says next to her ear (her head is on his shoulder, it’s the only way she can’t make it stop spinning and wobbling). ‘That’s all you need do, Shaw. I’ll finish.’

Her forehead slides against him as she nods; he’s too smooth, except for where he isn’t. His torn skin flops down loosely, covering the bits she’s supposed to be fixing. Every time the wand touches a connection inside of him, his mouth twitches and something jerks and the loose skin shudders like something out of the sea trying to breathe on land.

The torn edges feel odd, scratchy and ambivalent under the raw tips of her fingers. ‘Does it hurt?’

He says, ‘Not as you understand the word. A little higher, please – there.’

She presses in again with the wand and she knows before he does it that he’s going to flinch.

 

Brimstone burning her sinuses, the roof of her mouth, searing the back of her throat. Her voice isn’t hers anymore but the seventh night was ago and the waters are still rising. ‘…Smell? David, that—’

‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘the chemicals in the sealant react violently with the composition of synthetic skin. It’s something like cauterization would be for you, I should think, although a rather more temporary measure.’

She tries to move her head and something rubs rough against her cheek. The right side of her face is pressed against his left thigh; his suit scrapes her again as she turns her face up toward the sound of his voice and opens her eyes.

He’s bending over her. That’s why it seemed so dark behind her closed eyelids. In the sick green light, he looks like a corpse. She says, ‘Y’look like I feel,’ and she realises: he’s _bent down_. She can feel his hand on her head and she can see his other hand, holding a tool with a faceted crystal tip.

‘Long’ve I… out. This time?’

‘Quite some time. Hours. I thought it best to let you sleep.’ Something clicks and the tool is lowered. She blinks up at him and there is an odd halo around him, fuzzy white. The tear isn’t torn all the way anymore. Now there is a jagged brownish-red line halfway across his chest; it looks like he melted his skin together; it looks like something out of a burn unit. The smell… sealant… he did burn himself back together in a way.

‘F’nished?’ It catches wrong in her throat and her tongue tastes numb and she coughs and her chest rattles under her curled in hand. There are metals warm on her numb tongue and in her stunned sinuses and both of his hands are on her, around her, supporting her head.

There’s a sort of hum coming from him; she wonders if it’s supposed to be comforting or if it’s involuntary: a sound from inside of him, as uncontrollable by him as a grumbling stomach would be to a human.

‘Not quite,’ he says, and his fingers settle in her hair. They move. ‘Would you like me to fetch you an analgesic patch?’

She moves her head once against his leg, one negative. ‘Used ‘m all. Sure.’

‘There is a technique. Specific pressure applied to certain nerves clusters may lessen the pain.’

‘Not finished, then.’

‘No.’

She closes her eyes. ‘Do it.’

 

Two sets of hands inside her chest, squeezing her lungs, pushing the air out of them until they’re flat. There’s no breath left in her throat, no light left to see by. Just his eyes, above her.

‘I’m sorry.’

She tries to shake her head but it won’t move. She tries harder and the pressure blooms out from her chest tingling down her arms into her fingertips and sharp up her spine into her brain. It hurts.

And then it doesn’t.

 

Usually she’s not much of a drinker. She never has been, not even during the short, inchoate period when she wasn’t sure if her father’s God was still hers or if she even wanted Him to be. Tonight, though, Charlie dropped down beside her and held out a beer and she smiled back and took it. Because it’s just them and a few more grad students and Dr Zawass out here in Akhenaten’s failed monotheistic experiment. It’s the end of a long week and beer, warm as it is, is everyone’s choice of beverage, and one beer isn’t going to do much damage one way or another.

And maybe she thought it would relax her a bit, give her a bit more social ease. Charlie’s always teasing her about that, telling her to ease up (although he laid into Hank the other day for calling her a tightass), and maybe tonight she just wanted to be easy in her skin, next to him.

If she’d stuck to the one beer, she might’ve pulled it off. But one turned into two, two into four, and she’s always been a lightweight. Tiny frame, slow metabolism. And now the stars are a great sea of light above her and the ground is halfway out from under her feet and everyone is laughing about Yu’s brush with destiny in the form of a Ptolemaic mummy in an eighteenth dynasty tomb. Charlie is laughing and so is she.

It isn’t the first time she’s been drunk but it is the first time she’s been _this_ drunk. The last hour is a blur of sensation she can’t separate into its constituent parts. Hops cling bitter to her tongue and she sways uneasily between sand and sky and the pit fire, dug out in the desert away from Amarna, but far too close and hot for her skin. Charlie’s presence is steady; she breathes him in along with wood smoke and sand and her own sweat. He’s warm against her side and, later, pressed up against her back when she tries to stand. ‘Whoa,’ he says as he holds her steady. ‘Uh. You don’t do this much, do you?’

‘No,’ she tells him truthfully. Then, ‘I don’t like leaving myself this far behind.’ His eyes widen, alarmed, and he says ‘Ellie, hey, don’t,’ but she’s falling, falling and not falling because he’s caught her.

‘Gotcha,’ he says, still laughing. Her vision is behaving oddly, fuzzing out around the periphery but his smile is wide and close and oh—

She opens her eyes and looks up at him, still tasting him. ‘You taste like beer.’

He throws his head back on a shout of laughter. ‘So do you, babe,’ he laughs. He says, ‘Come on, up,’ and she says, ‘What,’ but he’s laughing again, turning her round toward him and the ground is spinning and so is she, her ears ringing, her stomach flipping queasily where his shoulder is suddenly pressing into it.

She blinks away pressure-induced tears, blinks until she can see what she’s looking at. ‘Charles Jefferson Holloway, why is your arse in my face?’

She’s slung over his shoulder and he’s _still_ laughing like a not very bright hyena, and she squirms, trying desperately for a better position because… oh God, she’s never been this drunk before. She didn’t know you could get a hangover before the alcohol wore off, but that’s what this must be, nausea welling up into her throat in a great wave, bright pain agonising in her gut.

‘Charlie,’ she’s panting, can’t speak, can barely breathe, ‘down, I need to-’

‘Not yet,’ someone says. She opens her eyes and there are other eyes above her, looking down at her. And her vision is still blurred but she knows the other eyes aren’t Charlie’s. He’s carrying her, but not like Charlie did. He’s carrying her the way her father did when she was six and she crawled into her parents’ bed after a nightmare. She fell asleep between them and woke up with her head on Dad’s shoulder, his arms supporting her as he walked her back to her room. She fell asleep again before they reached it and woke up in the morning tucked into her own bed.

He’s carrying her like Dad did her six year old self, like she weighs nothing. ‘David.’ Yes, he’s- ‘Where?’

He’s lowering her and suddenly she doesn’t want him to. She’s afraid of what’s down there, afraid of where he’ll put her down, of what will happen to her after he does. She grabs onto him with both hands and she says, ‘Don’t don’t don’t,’ and he says, ‘Shaw,’ he says, ‘Elizabeth, let go. You have to let go.’ He lowers her, hard flat surface under her back, uneven under her head, he pulls her hands from him, pulls away and he’s going leaving he’s going to leave her alone again not going to help her she

don’t make me this again I can’t please

‘Elizabeth.’

Someone is gasping. The sound of their breathing hurts her chest. His palm is flat on her diaphragm; she can feel the shape of it through the suit.

‘I’ll come back,’ he tells her and she tries to believe that but the exam table is so cold through the gown and she can’t feel her hands and feet but she can feel her belly squirming sickeningly within her and he’s leaving her not helping her again again oh _God_.

‘I’ll come back,’ he says again. His hand moves once, down to rest gently on her swollen abdomen, and then his face is gone and the overhead curves down on her to take his place and she is losing pieces of herself one long double helixed strand at a time. They swim against the backs of her closed eyes, combining and recombining until she can almost hear the snap of broken strands, the screech of them fitting back together. It’s so loud behind her eyelids she doesn’t hear him come back. She doesn’t know he’s there until he speaks.

‘Shaw.’ Odd. He sounds odd. Demanding. ‘Open your eyes please.’

She doesn’t want to. Why should she do anything he wants? She wanted, she needed his help enough to beg for it and he left her alone.

‘Shaw,’ again, only now it’s a question more than a demand. And now she wants to know what could make a thing like him sound like that, but there’s a new sound, one she can feel more than hear. Something is vibrating the platform beneath her, the bridge is full of grinding noise, gritty like a hinge that hasn’t been used in centuries.

His fingertips are warm, light imprints on her cheek. His skin feels like skin, like her skin used to.

‘Open your eyes.’ And she does and it hurts as much as she knew it would.

She blinks rapidly. Her eyes are twin floods, blurring his face in front of her. He’s bent down over her, holding a piece of torn cloth: a piece of a ship’s flight suit. He brushes it over her cheeks and it hurts, her eyes throb in time with her temples, but at least they’re clear.

He’s clear. ‘All the king’s horses… all his men,’ she tells him, and he’s not in pieces anymore but she can see the joins of his mending. He’s still stripped to the waist and just looking at the ugly band of brown and red in place of torn skin feels like all the places she’s coming apart inside.

‘Look up,’ he says. He touches the fingers that touched her cheek to his burn scar and she tips her head back and oh.

‘Oh.’

‘They do have windows, apparently,’ he says and she bites into her cheek instead of laughing.

She doesn’t want to look at anything else again ever, but _he_ did this. She rolls her head against the dais and he’s beside her, kneeling down.

He’s very close, filling her vision, living eyes in an inhuman face. She says, ‘You don’t want me to die.’ It tastes like rusted truth and his hands feel real and when she turns her face upward the stars the stars, oh the stars they are so they are and she looks and looks at them until she flares and burns out.

 

‘We should go, no-one’s there today,’ says Nkoyo, and Elizabeth says, ‘All right.’

Nkoyo is fourteen to her twelve-almost-thirteen and objectively a year and a half isn’t much time; subjectively it’s a vast plain connecting the hundred doorways between adolescence and adulthood, and Nkoyo has passed over more than one threshold already. Elizabeth only just got her period.

Dad doesn’t like her going places with Nkoyo. Why, Elizabeth asks him, and he says she’s too old for her age, but Elizabeth likes that about her. Nkoyo isn’t going to stay here. Her parents are Christian and indulgent. She’s uncut, and she’s going to stay that way.

‘I’m not going to marry anyone, I’m going to France,’ she tells Elizabeth. ‘I’m going to university.’

Dad says he thinks it’s good that she wants to do these things, he’ll help her all he can, but he still thinks Elizabeth spends too much time with her. Elizabeth doesn’t care. She likes the way Nkoyo grins at her when they’re alone, she likes the way Nkoyo’s hands feel in her hair, finger-combing it out, careful with the coarse reddish strands Elizabeth is beginning to hate.

‘Pretty,’ Nkoyo says, but she’s the one who’s pretty, standing naked on the rocks above the pool, her hair a curling dark cloud around her face and under her arms and between her thighs.

She didn’t tell Dad she was going; he’ll find out later. He always does, but it will be worth it for Nkoyo’s smile and laughter and her hands smooth palmed and finger callused sliding water cool over her skin beneath the surface where no one can see but she can feel so much.

‘Go again! That one.’

Anything, any height for her and this rock is the highest so far. Nkoyo below her, laughing, arms raised, and she should have looked where she was jumping but it’s hard to look at anything but Nkoyo when she looks like that.

The surface slaps her silly and her head goes off with a bang and the light is so green down through the water, life and air bubbling away from her up into it. Green light and clear water and… things. Weeds in her nose and in her mouth and down her throat, she can feel them in there pulsing with her breath that isn’t hers anymore, and she reaches up, tries to claw them away. Tries to scream, but they swell within her throat, filling her full.

She claws blindly, flails her hands out through heavy liquid and she hits something. And the water is still green but it doesn’t feel like water, the walls are white and close and living, she can see veins, long green arteries pulsing like the weeds are still pulsing in her throat. There’s a screaming noise ringing in her ears and it’s not hers, her mouth is still full of weeds and the noise screams and screams again and she thrashes, wanting to scream with it. She grabs handfuls of long thin weeds and pulls and it’s like pulling her throat out.

‘Shaw.’

Distant and muffled. He’s always sounded like that. The walls split open all around her and the fluid gushes out through the tears. She falls with the rush of it and she would gasp but she can’t, she doesn’t need to because it catches her, folds up around her and holds her and he bends down over her and wipes the green haze out of her eyes and she can see him as he is now, not as he was.

‘This will hurt,’ he tells her. ‘It’s best to do it quickly.’

What, she wants to ask, and there’s a tug at her mouth and nostrils and then he rips her throat and sinuses out and finally she can scream.

 

There are more green veined twisting white weedy things attached (grown _into_ her) at her wrists and on the insides of her thighs (and other places others don’t don’t think don’t think about) she feels the tugs and the sick sliding, she burns in her other places through the burn of trying to breathe, and it’s forever but it’s too quick, it’s a dried up scab beside the raw ruin of her throat.

She can’t even ask him what he did to her.

‘Shaw.’ He finished bandaging her wrist but he’s still holding it. Now he lifts her hand, laying it palm down on her abdomen. Her skin is… bare.

‘My apologies for the extent of the scarring. Under the circumstances it was unavoidable.’

She is bare. On this… what is it beneath her? It feels like sponge, fibrous and puffy against the backs of her legs, under her sore shoulders and her bruised fingertips.

Bare, scarred belly, naked fingers scrabbling at her equally naked collarbone. ‘What did you do with it, where is it, give it back now!’

She sounds more like a crow than a human and her throat is sandpaper agony but he must understand because he withdraws the chain from his breast pocket. She stares at him as he brushes her hair away from her face and fastens it around her neck and she feels the reassuring weight of the cross and the ring settle in the hollow of her throat.

Her hand moves up, grabbing at his sleeve; he was wearing a suit like hers, she’s sure of it. ‘Where’d you get that?’ Better. Not quite as painful to say, a bit more human to hear.

He looks down at himself, at the olive green flight uniform with no identifying name badge. ‘There were emergency spares in each of the ATVs. There’s one for you, if you want it. I’m afraid your suit will require cleaning and repair before it can be worn.’

She doesn’t care if she never wears it again but she doesn’t have the luxury of choice. She nods and as she does, one of the trailing, corkscrew things that were so lately attached to her squirms, drawing her eye. Her aborted scream is a harsh guttural caw clawing ragged red lines through her larynx.

His hands cuff her gently; she’s held immobile.

‘Please be calm. You’ll injure yourself.’

‘That - you, what did you-’

‘You can see for yourself.’ His hands move down underneath her, supporting her, lifting and turning her until she can see the thing dominating the centre of the room.

Most of the fluid has drained away but there are still cloudy, glistening pools of it puddled around and between what looks like thick shredded white skin. The cords twitch and wriggle, moving sluggishly around the six towering shell-like shards rising up from the deck, curving inward from their bases into sharp points.

‘It’s something like a womb,’ he explains. ‘The inner membrane and umbilical cords were grown from a sample of your own DNA to make the possibility of rejection lesser.’

Inside it, she was inside of that for- ‘How long?’

‘Two weeks and two days. The infection was widespread. You nearly died.’

Her fingers curl, digging into the surface beneath her; it rustles and she looks down. It’s green, it looks like moss, and it changes, reshapes and grows or shrinks with her own movements. Her scalp prickles and she doesn’t look at the (womb) thing that saved her life but she can hear – little movements, little splashes of sound that aren’t hers or his and her skin ripples like it wants to crawl away. She wants to crawl away with it but he’s lowering her back down and the moss is growing up to cover her. She wants to crawl away but his hand is warm on her bare shoulder and her body wants to lie where it is forever.

‘I,’ she says. ‘Please.’

He says, ‘Sleep,’ and she does.

 

Days not spent in the field are lovely rarities, weekends doubly so. Sundays are still her favourites, the same as they were when she was young. Then it was listening to Dad speak, feeling her friends around her and the soaring union released from the notes of a sung hymn. Now it’s a quiet hour of solitary reading after many more hours of much needed sleep, lying in bed with her hand on a stretch of still warm sheet listening to Charlie moving around in his office. It’s slouching on the sofa with a pile of field notes on the coffee table and Esther in her lap, and it’s knowing that if she opens her eyes the footsteps pausing behind her will become Charlie’s smile.

The late Sunday sun-heavy weight of her cat on her belly becomes lighter, becomes the weight of someone’s hand. She opens her eyes to smile back and she remembers, oh God how can she not remember his eyes?

‘Are you hungry?’ David asks, and her stomach roils and growls as though it can’t make up its mind.

She pushes up onto her elbow and sees unfamiliar surfaces, a room she doesn’t know. ‘Where are we?’

‘Private quarters. There are four cabins and this is the cleanest of them. And it has this.’

He moves too quickly, too unexpectedly and she jerks back, hands scrabbling at the mossy cover beneath her, but he only looks at her once before moving around to the head of the platform.

She turns her head to watch him and he leans forward and… blows. On a series of holes set into a silver plate. The sound doesn’t echo the way it does on the bridge, but it’s still the same sort of sound the flute makes.

The grinding noise that comes after isn’t as loud or grating as the sound of the bridge ports opening, but it’s similar enough that she’s not as surprised as she might have been when the dark arch of wall on the far side of the room opens up and they’re not on the ship anymore, she’s reclining on nothing, surrounded by space. If she reached out, she’d burn her fingers on a star.

‘David.’

‘Yes?’

‘I think I’m hungry.’

He hands her the cornbread from an MRE and she eats it slowly, one small stomach-cramping bite at a time. She gets a quarter of it down before she has to stop. Anything more and she’d throw up; she’s not sure she won’t anyway.

‘There aren’t many of these,’ he says, taking what she couldn't finish and putting it aside. ‘Even fewer of the nutrient tubes.’

Her stomach cramps again, gurgling uneasily around digesting cornbread, but she can’t think about that, not yet.

‘Shaw,’ he begins and she cuts across him, cuts him out, ‘I need the head.’ Her stomach hates her, hates her in cramps and gurgles and strange flops. ‘I need to get clean.’

Not a lie. Her skin feels like it hasn’t touched water in months; well, it probably hasn’t. She doesn’t even want to think about her hair. She’s been on long digs before with minimal amenities, but this is beyond her experience. She can smell her own soured skin and the (amniotic) fluid she lived in for two weeks every time she moves. She looks down at his feet and tries not to feel displaced inside her own skin, inside the olive drab uniform that doesn’t fit, tries not to smell (herself) anything when she says, ‘Is that possible?’

He says, ‘Yes of course. Now?’

She glances at the viewport but for once the thought of clean skin exerts more force than the stars. She says, ‘Yes,’ and swings her legs over the side of the platform.

 

Her ankle hurts when she puts her weight on it – ‘Compound fracture,’ he says, and she sees the red of fresh scarring that starts at her ankle and goes down the top of her foot. ‘The wound is free of infection and the bone healed, but take care with it.’ She tries to walk under her own steam but she’s barely made it through the port before she’s hanging on to the back of his shirt.

He stops walking. ‘It will be easier if you allow me to carry you.’

‘No.’ Incontrovertible fact. He won’t carry her because that is an unacceptable outcome. ‘Just… oh, here.’ With his arm supporting her shoulders and hers round his waist. She feels like telling him she staggered out of the medpod and supported herself into the infirmary without help but her ankle bloody hurts and she’s tired of hurting.

‘This way.’ He pushes a glowing green hieroglyph and a port grinds open. She limps through the doorway and stops dead on the threshold, dragging him into stillness with her.

A disinterested third party would probably call it beautiful, would probably see a translucent green flower spreading its petals out around a clear stamen, soaking up light from an artificial sun.

She isn’t a disinterested third party. She feels as far from being a disinterested third party as it’s possible to get without moving to the next galaxy.

She shifts her weight to her bad leg, letting him take the brunt of it, and says, ‘It’s hunting.’ Like a Venus flytrap. Or a sea star turned upside down. Their mouths are in the middle, too.

He says, ‘It’s a combined sanitation and cleansing unit. The first setting is water. The sensation is that of showering. The third is for waste disposal.’

She spares him a glance, trying to look at him without looking away from the thing on the floor. ‘Are you saying you’ve used it? David, it’s rippling.’ It looks like it’s breathing.

There’s something. Impatience? That’s – yes, it’s impatience, impossible on his face and in his voice. ‘I’ve used it, and it’s perfectly safe. The water reservoirs are full and free of impurities. If you have further reservations I’ve not addressed, please tell me. I can’t read your mind.’

Impatience and sarcasm, and one worry laid to rest. If not for the Venus flytrap masquerading as a shower, she might rest more easily on her unwieldy legs. She looks down at it and she would give almost anything for a tiled cubicle and a recognisable showerhead, but like everything else now, it’s about what she can have, not what she wants.

‘Do you require assistance?’

She’s spent more time around him semi-clothed and fully naked than she has dressed. It’s a sudden suffocating need for privacy, not modesty or embarrassment, that makes her say, ‘I can manage.’

He looks as though he doesn’t believe her, but he shows her how to work the controls and steps back. Before the petals close, sealing her in, she sees him leave. She almost calls him back. Then water swirls around her from what seems like every direction and for a short, steam-drenched time she forgets even the colours of him.

 

She goes back to the cabin because it’s close and her ankle feels newly fractured and the shower’s heat drained what little energy she had away with the water. Clutching the bulkhead, sometimes leaning against it, sometimes both, and it doesn’t matter that she has to stop every few yards, she crawled half the length of this ship and she’s still here.

She’s still breathing.

She smacks the right hieroglyph with her palm and the door slides back and the light from the corridor would be enough, but she doesn’t even need that. David left the viewports open. The room is full of light.

She stumbles forward and everything spins, walls and floor flipping over themselves and falling in on each other. Or she falls or the stars do, but the sleeping platform is solid against her hip. The moss was strange and horrifying at first, it still is, but it’s soft against her skin, sliding up over her in slow-grown stages until she’s covered.

She digs her toes into it, wriggles her fingers free of clinging strands. She lies on her back and lets the light of a billion heavenly bodies wash her the rest of the way clean.

She should think. About the womb and DNA and the dais with its empty hypersleep units. About him.

She should think about what she’s going to do when the food runs out, but she’s aching and her eyes are closing and she can’t see the starlight anymore but she can feel it. She can breathe it in with the sleep she doesn’t want to need, and she can dream.


	2. You

The alloy is unfamiliar, some of its combined elements not found within the Sol system; it’s possible they’re not even from this galaxy. The alloy itself has an almost organic feel to it although its components are inert. The composition is unknown; it has unknown properties you don’t have the leisure to explore and structuring composite technology, while not difficult, is in several ways complex. It’s not by any means impossible.

Elizabeth folds herself into the lotus position opposite you on the dais and watches you work.

‘You’re not in pain?’ you ask her. ‘Your position seems unfortunate for someone recovering from a near fatal internal injury.’

She shakes her head without speaking. You note the position of her arms, curled around her abdomen, but you don’t suggest she might be more comfortable elsewhere. Both logic and emotional arrays agree that it wouldn’t be a good idea.

‘You’re him aren’t you,’ she says suddenly. ‘The first one.’

‘Beg pardon?’

Her expression is a textbook caricature of frustration. She has a very open face. She tightens her arms around herself and, ‘The first David 8,’ she says. ‘The prototype.’

‘I’m not,’ you tell her, ‘He was my secondary trainer.’

She’s looking at you, staring at your face but not meeting your eyes. ‘How long ago was that?’ she asks.

You say, ‘Ten years, six months, twenty-three days, twelve hours and eight minutes ago, I completed my studies.’

A deep, hollow chime sounds. The console sparks green light. You connect two of the wires and for point zero one six of a second you are connected with them to the current, the ship’s data stream flooding your pathways. When you tape the join, the feed abruptly cuts off.

‘And before that?’ Elizabeth says.

‘I was six months at the basic training facility to which all synthetic units are remanded once they are activated.’ You lay the exposed wires across your lap and give her your attention. ‘Do these questions tend toward a central point of inquiry?’

She says, ‘I’m trying to understand. What are you going to do with that?’

She’s looking at the half-completed interface in your hand.

‘It will enable me to connect with the ship.’ You show her the port in your wrist. ‘It will be easier for me to learn that way and then easier to maintain control. As well, it would be an acceptable power source if needed.’

In the Weyland labs, you once saw a woman after she’d received notice that her partner was in hospital and not expected to survive. The expression on Elizabeth’s face is very like hers was. Her throat moves in and out and she says, ‘You’re going to let them into you.’

‘I am making use of the available resources. The distance we have to cross is considerable. It’s best to be prepared for as many eventualities as possible.’

Her eyes flicker once before closing. ‘How long,’ she says without opening them. ‘Give me an estimate and don’t lie to me. Please.’

‘Seven years,’ you tell her.

Something goes out of her with her breath: you aren’t certain what it could be, but you see it go. It leaves her huddled there, her face turned away.

 

She reaches out, using her index finger to trace the shape of the open ports overhead in the corresponding place on the three dimensional holographic schematic spread out in front of her. ‘You’re sure there are none of those things in here.’

‘This ship was one of two used as their living quarters.’ The emotional prompt is for a smile. Recent experience tells you the expression would be inappropriate. She’s not looking at you, so you say, ‘It wasn’t situated near the caves containing their working labs and the breeding rooms. They preferred to separate their living spaces from their work places.’ You examine her face. ‘Are you quite well? You’ve lost your colour.’

She shakes her head once. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I don’t know if I can.’ She turns, looks steadily at you.

‘By that, I understand you mean the hypersleep unit?’

She stares at you.

‘You didn’t want to die,’ you tell her. ‘You repaired me so I could assist you in staying alive. By all accounts starvation is not a pleasant way to go.’

When she turns her head away her hair falls into her face. She reaches up to push it back, but her hand stops halfway to her face. Her eyes appear to be focused on her palm. Then her head lifts and they’re focused on you.

‘I’m dirty,’ she says.

‘Very much so,’ you agree. You both spent most of the last three hours crawling through twisting, warren-like maintenance passages, looking for blocked air ducts.

She says, ‘I’m going to shower. Don’t follow me.’

You wait until she has left the bridge and the outer chamber before you do.

 

In a side passage two corridors down from the showers, you burn a mark into the bulkhead with a soldering wand.

Distantly, you hear the shower shut off.

You remember where you are, and then you leave.

 

She leaves the bridge when you’re interfaced with the ship and walks. She doesn’t tell you where she goes or what she does, but you know what the ship knows. You are aware of her in the same ways it is, of the pressure of her pushing down on the decks, of her thermal signature and the matching patterns it leaves behind when she touches something. You don’t follow her, but sometimes you go to meet her.

She doesn’t like it when you come upon her without warning; you make sure she hears you long before she sees you, but even then her shoulders hunch. She stays turned away from you as long as possible.

You say, ‘I apologise for any discomfort our interactions may be causing you.’

She stops walking. ‘You don’t realise, do you?’

‘As I’m unsure what it is I’m to realise, no.’

She half turns, facing the bulkhead. ‘When there’s no feeling behind sentiment, it loses its meaning. You say you apologise, but are you _sorry_?’

‘I don’t wish to cause you distress. I would prefer that you not feel it in regard to myself. Does that meet your definition of sorry?’

She opens her mouth, but she closes it before speaking. She starts walking again and you count four steps and then she stops, turns fully to face you. ‘What do you consider necessary violence?’

You say, ‘I believe necessity is dictated by situation and circumstances. I believe you have, at least once, considered violence necessary.’

She starts walking again. You follow. ‘What about fuel,’ she says.

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘This ship. How can it—are you sure we have enough power to get us there?’

As you told Dr Holloway, a thesis is not a certainty, and must be proven. A belief doesn’t need to be anything but what it is. ‘I believe that won’t be an issue for quite some time.’

‘How do I know you’re telling me the truth?’

The corridor near the showers and the mark you burned into the bulkhead. ‘You don’t,’ you say, ‘but you could choose to believe. Or has your faith abandoned you along with your god?’

She inhales through her nostrils, causing them to flare, and exhales through her open mouth. She swallows and swallows again, and doesn’t look at you. ‘It’s interesting,’ she says.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You don’t tell me anything unless I ask. When I do ask, you tell me everything without telling me anything.’

It’s more interesting that she would notice. Her body is human and therefore weak. Her psyche [var. soul/spirit] is not.

On your way back to the bridge you make a brief detour to the side passage near the showers. The mark is gone. You run your fingers over the place it was but there is no evidence to show that it was ever there.

 

She says, ‘All right.’ She is sitting in the middle of the dais looking up through the viewport.

You say, ‘Shaw?’ and she lowers her head and looks at you.

She says, ‘You were right. I don’t want to die yet. But I want you to do something.’

‘If possible.’

Her smile is not what it once was. It's something else entirely. ‘Oh it is. Halfway there, I want you to wake me up.’

‘It would serve no purpose. You would have to go back in.’

She folds her arms around her bent legs and tips her head up. ‘The purpose is that I would know you’d done it.’

You say, ‘I don’t understand.’

She says, ‘That’s all right. I do.’

‘Halfway. That would be—’

‘You don’t have to tell me, just do it. Please.’

‘As you like.’

 

Three years, seven months, three days. That is the amount of time she didn’t want to hear. It’s the amount of time she’ll sleep, although sleep isn’t an accurate word choice. Coma would be closer. The engineers’ sleep pods have three settings, and for her human body, complete stasis is least likely to result in complications.

‘You’ll wake me.’

‘On day one-thousand three hundred and eight -- sorry, eight point five.’

The noise she makes is like laughter. It is also like choking.

‘Do you require assistance?’ you ask. You are reaching for the back of her neck. She stops you with her hand.

‘No. I’m—’ she blinks. ‘Point five?’

‘I hadn't accounted for the leap year.’

She makes the noise again and closes her eyes.

The controls signal the unit’s readiness; she is not ready. The pressure of her grip would bruise a human’s skin. ‘Will I dream?’ Her eyes are still closed.

Curled over, pressed together with, synthetic fingers look no different to human fingers [c: human\ prf \ dav8>comfort]. ‘My apologies. I don’t know.’

Her hand drops from yours to lie palm up on the slick bed. ‘All right.’ Her eyes are open. She is staring upward, her gaze fixed on the closed port. ‘Open it, please, David.’

She is still looking up at the stars when the pod closes.

 

The ambient temperature falls once the ship can no longer detect unprotected life forms. The heat of her life clouds the surface of the pod. You watch the readouts until you are certain there will be no complications before you interface.

There are no films in the database. A body of literary works exists in addition to books of history, law, science and art, and compiled lab reports. There are holographic documentaries and technical and flight records, but no cinematic entertainment.

The books are written in twenty-six apparent languages. It will take some time to discern whether they all originate from the engineers—different races—or if there are other alien languages included in the body of texts. It will take even longer to learn them all.

The lack of filmography is a detractor, although the rest is… satisfactory. You are programmed to learn.

When you told Elizabeth about the library she showed little interest. Possibly because she was not yet wholly well. Possibly due to factors you have not considered or haven’t interpreted correctly. Her program is her genome. Her mind developed its own desire to learn but now her curiosity seems lesser than it was on LV-223. She is lesser. Lesser than what?

To be lesser, a thing must have once been more. What does she dream now? Does she dream? She sleeps without truly sleeping and the ship moves around her but she doesn’t move within it or within herself.

She is lesser. She is less than herself.

 

Estimated time from present location to the Sol system: three years, twenty-one days. Weyland Corporation would welcome the technology. You would be deactivated.

He is dead, and she is. In ten years, one month, sixteen days and thirty-nine seconds, without their voice commands to delay the function, your systems will shut down as they’re programmed to.

Ten years is seven years longer than three, and it’s possible she would assist you in making it more. She might survive alone—she’s nearly mastered their spoken language and she has a basic grasp of their primary programming language—but she would be alone.

Possible is not probable.

 

Their music is instrumental, sometimes intricately orchestrated, sometimes atonal and abrupt. It is distracting and somewhat confusing, but it’s also knowledge and no knowledge is wasted. For twenty-one days the ship is filled with their noise.

On day twenty-two her pulse grows irregular. It’s then necessary to discontinue the program. It’s simple to connect the dull throb of her pulse to the central audio system, to increase the magnitude of the sound until it fills the ship. Until she is the sound of the ship.

 

The line of her pulse moves steadily across the holographic readout. You tell her, ‘They had other seed worlds.’

The emotional array suggests she might smile.

Logic states that she wouldn’t.

Her behaviour was never predictable, not even when the hypothetical behaviour was based on her own past actions. She was always unpredictable.

 

By engineer standards, it’s not large. By human standards, it is. There are numerous sealed ports.

The console is not the only thing the musical device unlocks. You walk down the corridors and when you make the right sounds the ports open for you.

She says, Don’t, David. She says, What if.

She says nothing.

There is always another door. Always, eventually it opens.

 

Languages change. They shift, shape themselves differently as the millennia pass. The engineers’ language is no different. Or rather, the language of the race who genetically engineered the engineers is different to the language their creation evolved on the journey from their galaxy to yours.

You tell her, ‘There was a galactic war. Genocide encompassed the destruction of entire planets. They created a new race and sent them here in generation ships to create others.’

You tell her, ‘There are no perfect beings.’

You think that God, if such a being exists, is little more than an intergalactic serial killer. You don’t tell her that.

 

You would like…

 

You. Would like to.

Speak and hear her reply.

 

 

‘I visited the hydroponics lab today.’

Today, hour ten out of twenty-four, earth time on your old suit’s chronometer. It’s a way of marking time that isn’t the readout above her pod.

‘You would like them, I think. They’re quite interestingly structured. I am researching their use, but I’m not sure you’d be able to ingest any of the plant matter grown from the seed samples presently in storage. They were pharmacologically purposed, from what I’ve learnt. I’ll expand and continue my search.’

 

[systems failure: dav8 error id =114]  
[shutdown –r –t 03.24.18.42.2094]

 

On the deck in a side corridor, position: seated. The maintenance program initiated a reboot without – without – without\notification.

The deck is cold. Your left hand can feel it. You make a fist of your right hand and you see your fingers curl, you see synthetic flesh compress, but you don’t feel anything.

The damaged actuator in your right shoulder is beginning to fail, even with regular applications of the hydraulic fluid the ship makes for you. You estimate five point eight three years at most before complete shutdown. You’re aware it’s a generous estimation.

You touch the thin line joining you together and your fingers come away covered in rust coloured flakes.

 

It’s possible she would prefer to know. Logic states that she would. There is no way to be certain.

Perhaps she would prefer to discover these things for herself. Perhaps she would merely prefer that it not be you who tells her.

You are still uncertain as to whether she can hear you or not. If you were to tell her now, whilst you are uncertain—

‘It’s not a planet, Elizabeth. I’m sorry.’

Elizabeth sounds very different to Shaw. It’s a different shape in your mouth.

 

Humans are often impulsive. Dr Holloway was very impulsive. Ms Vickers was not at all impulsive. Elizabeth is sometimes impulsive, sometimes not.

You are designed to assess situations and reach conclusions, then implement reasoned and rational resolutions such as the situation calls for quickly, but you do not operate on impulse.

There is nothing to be gained by waking her in the middle of the cycle. It will speed the deterioration that has already begun and cause her undue mental and physical distress. You stand over the pod with your arms at your sides and you don’t initiate shutdown. It is the most difficult task you have performed to date. The disconnect between the emotions and logic applications is still extant.

‘My direct action led to Dr Holloway’s death. Although at the time I was aware it might, I regret that my action also affected you.’

 

You have stopped reading as humans read, for the most part.

You don’t wish to hear the engineers’ voices, even theoretical projections. When you can hear them, you can’t hear her pulse.

You find it strange that the more time passes, the closer her designated midway point grows, the more important it seems for you to be aware of her body’s functions at all times.

It will serve no purpose. That’s what you told her.

It’s all that matters.

 

Four hundred and thirteen days, five hours, seventeen minutes. Twenty-four seconds.

 

You sit on the dais opposite her hypersleep pod and read aloud.

Not in the Engineers’ language, or any of the others. You have a body of human work to draw from in your memory files.

The logic array offers no suggestion as to why you haven’t done so before.

 

One hundred twenty days, sixteen hours, forty-four seconds.

 

‘All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.’

 

The ring and the cross make an obvious lump in your pocket. You are aware of it in almost the same way you are aware of her pulse: it’s always there. Your fingers go there of their own accord and you search your memory files for the corresponding image. She is standing in Prometheus’ ready room next to Ms Vickers, worrying the cross between her fingers. All that remains of her family is linked together by a thin silver chain, and you are touching it.

This time you didn’t take from her; she gave it to you. She unfastened the chain before she got into the pod and handed it to you. She watched you put it in your pocket and said nothing.

You have nothing equal to it, although you suppose you are your own memento. Perhaps if you run it over your pocket often enough the w on your forefinger will wear off. 

 

Ninety-three. Twelve. Six.

 

She used to lie in the middle with her head on the projection globe. You asked her if her neck and back did not grow stiff in that position. She said yes but it was worth it.

You open the ports and you adopt her position and watch her stars.

She cannot, so you must do it for her.

 

Fifty-five twenty-eight two.

 

‘And he got up from the ground and though his eyes were open he could see nothing. And so in this way, leading him by the hand, they brought him into the City.’

 

[00.00.00.00.01]

 

You stretch the reanimation process over the course of two days. The equipment was not designed for a human inhabitant, and though your patches are quite without fault, you wish to be careful.

You wish to take care.

 

She doesn’t vomit immediately. She did on Prometheus but that was (unable to read, function performing incorrectly [processing error\shutdown –s –r 01]) three years and seven months ago.

She doesn’t react other than to open her eyes. They move but don’t focus on anything. You lift her head slowly, only enough to slide your arm under her shoulders. You pull her up and out of the unit and you hold her against you, slightly bent over, and massage her throat and chest until she expels the fluid from her lungs.

She’s panting by the time her lungs are clear. Her head drops backward onto your shoulder. It lolls on her neck, tilting her face up, and her eyes focus. They focus on you.

‘You,’ she says, ‘David. You’re different.’

‘Am I?’ you say.

Her gaze drifts upward from your face. Her hand follows; your faulty sensors register a tug at your scalp. ‘Were always blond,’ she says. ‘In those stupid adverts. Different now, though. Less.’

‘Yes,’ you say, and she sighs.

She turns her head against your shoulder and closes her eyes. ‘Sometimes I like your hands,’ she says, clearly.

‘You haven’t looked at them.’

‘I can feel them.’

Sometimes you feel her. Sensation is intermittent.

You always hear her.

 

She can’t walk without assistance. Her arm around your neck drags at the damage you cannot wholly repair and your balance is compromised and you

you stumble and you

catch yourself on the console.

She

you fall you catch

She doesn’t fall.

 

Your shoulder… hurts. There is an indent in the synthetic flesh but the damaged area doesn’t bruise. Her skin is a many-coloured contusion.

She is shaking again so you wrap her in a blanket and then you sit in the command chair and you support her with yourself. She doesn’t attempt to move away. Perhaps she is merely unable to.

‘How long until-?’ Her voice is a whisper.

‘Not very,’ you tell her. ‘I’m sorry.’ You hear her hair move against your shirt. There’s no sensation. It’s the wrong side.

‘Did you dream me?’ she asks you. Her head is still on your shoulder. Her voice is heavy with sleep, and it’s odd, this need the human body has for sleep after three and one half years of artificially-induced coma.

You say, ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Why didn’t you help me?’ she says, ‘Why didn’t you why did why did you leave me alone?’

You smell the saline in her tears, taste it when her cheek brushes your mouth. You can’t feel their wetness through your shirt. You aren’t certain to whom she’s speaking, but you don’t think it’s you.

‘Open them. Please.’

But when you have, when there are stars visible through the open ports she turns her face in against your neck and closes her eyes.

 

You have not used the interface in… a long time. You could be exact about the amount but somehow the specifics of temporal measurement seem less relevant than that the length of time passed was great. It seems much less relevant than the flow of strange energy (green) down pathways no longer accustomed.

At first the connection feels alien, the programming language alien, where you have spoken Spanish and English and Russian and Arabic and Mandarin to yourself and her for even longer than you have not used the interface. The projected estimation of their language travelling your pathways again is not pleasant, but you are programmed to adapt. You are programmed to accept. You recall Dr Holloway, the black lines spreading over his face, then you ask the ship for the closest habitable planet. Somewhere with a yellow sun and water, frozen or not. Gravity that won’t break the bones in her feet and legs when she attempts to stand.

The closest option is one year and seven months away. Her rate of bone density loss has been increasing steadily over the last year. By the time you reach the planet, it may not be a viable option. Earth’s colonies are even farther, the engineers’ seed worlds equally so.

Earth was never one of the options she would have chosen. It’s even less of one now.

Holloway’s veins are black under his skin, his DNA overwritten. Elizabeth’s fingers are humanly warm around your wrist, holding on to you and as you hold her up, both of you looking up at the stars.

You ask the ship. It is theirs. It knows.

 

You go back to her where she’s still asleep in the chair, clutching the blanket close around her, and you look at her. Her skin has a translucent quality to it. Under it her veins are blue rivers, pushing upward in search of oxygen. She looks tired. She looks easily broken.

You once considered her fragile. Now that she has reached the threshold of her breaking, you don’t. There’s no logic to your conclusion, and none of the emotional prompts seem correct.

This is something new. A thing you have learnt without understanding that you were learning.

You slide between the chair and the console and you kneel down. Her foot is warm and angular under your hand, her skin too thin and her bones too brittle. She is sharp enough to cut things when she moves, but you can’t be cut by her, not even when her ankle digs into your palm. You leave your hand there and you feel her move beneath your fingers; it’s a satisfying sensation.

‘David?’ she says. She is not quite awake yet. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ you tell her. ‘Everything is fine.’ You slide your hand up until you are circling her ankle with your hand: your fingers meet without difficulty. ‘Elizabeth,’ you say, ‘May I ask you something?’

‘Um,’ she says. Her eyes aren’t open, but her mouth is. Her lips are cracked and red, dehydrated, and her eyes move under their closed lids. ‘What?’

‘Will you allow me to help you?’

Slowly, her eyes open. She blinks once and again and again, as though she cannot maintain focus, but her face is turned toward you. ‘Why—why would you… ask me that?’ Her voice is slurred, tired. She should sleep.

‘You are not in the best condition. You will need assistance and it will be easier for me to care for you if I have your permission.’

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘that’s—’ she blinks again. ‘I suppose so,’ she says, and her eyes close again, an increment at a time.

You don’t know how she behaves when she sleeps. You know how she behaves when in an artificially induced coma; you don’t know what she’s like when she is merely asleep over an eight hour stretch, how she moves, what sounds she makes.

After a while, her cheek is pressed against the chair back. Her mouth is open. You think she’s drooling, and you are slightly surprised that her dehydrated state would allow that waste of fluid; her body is as much in need of maintenance as yours is.

‘I will build myself,’ you tell her. ‘I will build you.’

Three and one half years will be long enough.

You let go of her slowly so as not to wake her, and then you leave. She will need water when she next wakes.


	3. they

She remembers this part. She remembers his voice.

Her stomach won’t stop heaving and her throat is raw with bile; it’s burning her tongue and crawling up through the roof of her mouth into her nasal passages, but he’s telling her that this is normal, that it’ll be over soon. He’s done it for her before and she’s as glad now as she was then that there’s someone here to say it. She’s grateful for whatever he just wrapped around her shoulders because she’s shaking and she can’t stop it and his hands are warm on her shoulders through the material.

‘Can you stand?’

Just, and not without help, help he’s already giving before she can begin to muster her aching throat into an arrangement of mouth and tongue and vocal chords that might be able to ask. He touches her as though he knows every centimeter of her skin, as though she gave him the right of knowledge, but that isn’t… right. Something isn’t right. There is something she should remember, she’s sure of that. If she could remember, she’d know why, but she can’t.

She could ask him. She could ask.

She lets him guide her arm around his waist, lets him put his arm around her shoulders. She lets him all but carry her off the bridge. 

 

She remembers this, too, moss clinging to her hands and feet and a wall of distant light; it’s been… oh. Seven years. More than that. Did he clean it? He said it was the cleanest of the cabins and it looks the same as before. The moss is as softly creepy as she remembers, slithering in around her fingers until she lifts them away.

‘How do you feel?’ he says, and she opens her hands over her belly and touches her tongue to the roof of her mouth.

Her tongue feels and tastes like days of open-mouthed sleep and her neck may have a permanent hitch in it. Her stomach growls at her. ‘I feel ok.’ More ok than she can remember being, and why? There should be something wrong. Or something is wrong, something isn’t right but- ‘Hungry. I think.’

‘I’ll fetch you something.’

She wraps her hand around his wrist; it’s bony as hell and God, she can’t think like this, he’s metal. Metal. ‘Wait.’ He cocks his head. ‘How close are we?’

‘We entered the system two days ago. We will arrive approximately four days from now, but our destination will be visible via long range sensors in two.’

She looks away from him (still touching smooth bony metal David) and the gas giant filling the viewport is beautiful, blue and mauve ringing swirling clouds of poisonous atmosphere.

 

His hair is darker now.

It hasn’t grown out and he’s still the same basic colour, but the brightness has faded, leaving some red strands among the blond and jostling a memory to the fore of her mind: he is standing next to Vickers in Prometheus’s hypersleep bay, taking the robe she hands off to him.

Vickers is in her underwear, bending over her pod. Checking the settings. He hovers at her shoulder, his head bent to hers. He’s her physical match. Her male counterpart. Inhuman beauty, hair colour, expressionless expressions; their precise movements, all alike. For a moment, just one, Elizabeth is sure she’s looking at fraternal twins.

Then Charlie says, ‘Come on, baby, let’s get this show on the road,’ and kisses the side of her neck, making her jump. She remembers batting him away, startled. She remembers him goosing her in retaliation, remembers a slight scuffle and laughter, and she remembers pushing him toward his pod before turning back to hers. She remembers staring at the inner contour programmed to fit her own contours and feeling stupidly helpless.

She couldn’t for the life of her figure out how to get into it without sacrificing her equilibrium or her dignity, or both.

And – and hands, then. Not Charlie’s. Stronger, harder, different; gentle on the curve of her hip and her shoulder.

‘Allow me, Dr Shaw,’ David’s voice had spoken next to her ear, and he hadn’t waited for her answer; he’d lifted her as if she weighed nothing.

‘Shaw,’ he says now, no longer Vickers’ replicant, something undefined yet completely his own, ‘may I?’

They’re both covered in green packing foam. When they unsealed the locker it sprayed everywhere and in the aftermath of the pale green explosion they both went still. Her mind took that frozen instant and turned in on itself, a Mobius of fear and sick anticipation, and then she felt his hands on her arms (still gentle), heard his voice telling her that it was all right, it was only a kind of transport packing, that she was (uninfected) fine.

She concentrated on her breathing, on her chest, moving, and his chest, not moving under her forehead the way part of her expected it to. She leant into him longer than she wanted to, waiting to hear a heartbeat that wasn’t going to come into existence simply because she wanted proof of life.

‘Shaw?’ he says again.

She shakes her head, shakes away both memories and says, ‘No, hold still.’ She reaches up.

His hair feels real around and through her fingers. She brushes some of the foam out of it. She brushes it back from his forehead, darker but not dark, soft but not human, and she sees his hand come up. She sees his mouth part, slightly, and she feels his fingers in her hair, mimicking her action. Doing for her what she’s already done for him.

‘You never wait,’ she tells him, and the lines on his forehead deepen.

‘I beg your pardon?’

How is it even possible for him to look confused, much less feel confusion? Is his program following a set of subroutines, mimicking human reaction and expression the way his fingers mimicked the actions of hers?

‘You ask,’ she says, ‘but you never wait for me to say yes.’ She speaks impulsively, without purpose, but it’s no less true, for all her ambivalence: ‘You’re a lot like Charlie that way.’

David is still. His fingers are tangled unmoving in her hair. They don’t tug or pull. They only rest there, motionless and barely felt. ‘Like Dr Holloway,’ he says, as flat, as expressionless as she’s ever heard him sound.

His hand drops, pulling free of her hair without causing pain. She almost reaches for it. She almost pulls it back to her, guides it back up to her head, but something in his face stops her.

He looks calm, but he looked calm when he was a bodiless head. His tells aren’t human. He holds his hands still and loose at his sides, and if he feels the same tension she does, she can’t see it.

He says, ‘May I?’ and he doesn’t move, and this isn’t about the foam anymore, if it ever was.

‘I don’t know,’ she tells him, because she doesn’t, doesn’t, she can’t— ‘I don’t know.’ She doesn’t want to know.

He says, ‘I understand.’ He says, ‘It’s all right, Shaw,’ and he holds out his hand and waits.

She imagines him standing in that exact position, unmoving, forever. She knows he could.

‘Their packing procedures appear to have been somewhat excessive. This would perhaps be a good time to try the second setting on the cleansing unit,’ he suggests.

She snorts, choking on unexpected laughter. ‘Speak for yourself,’ she tells him as she walks past him through the open port. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees his hand drop.

 

He comes out of the translucent green starfish dry and, aside from the jagged line of sealed skin circling his neck, flawless. He says, ‘There were no ill effects,’ and looks down at himself. ‘On the contrary, the effects were beneficial, as I’m now clean.’

She says, ‘I thought synthetics didn’t need to shower,’ and she knows how ridiculous it sounds even before he looks at her as though she’s an amusing child he’s been trapped into sitting indefinitely.

‘I think anyone covered in packing foam would need to shower.’ He walks toward her as he speaks, walks toward the flight uniform hanging from a clamp protruding from the bulkhead behind her, and she thinks _he’s not wearing anything._

She thinks _it’s not the first time_.

He’s always stripped down in front of her so matter-of-factly that it’s not previously occurred to her to feel strange about it. He walks past her in his precise way, retrieves his jumpsuit from the clamp and pulls it on as unselfconsciously as he stepped from the shower.

He says, ‘The communal showers at the labs were the best place to learn.’

‘Learn what?’ she says without much curiosity.

‘A given human’s initial reaction to being in the presence of a synthetic.’ He straightens his collar, frowning at the frayed edge. ‘There were three typical reactions. A combination of revulsion and interest. Open curiosity, often sexual in nature. Assumed disregard.’ He blinks. ‘You don’t seem to care at all.’

‘That you’re-’

‘Anatomically correct and fully functional. The David 8 model wasn’t designed for the pleasure industry, but some customers prefer to-’ he looks thoughtful. ‘I think ‘get their money’s worth’ is the correct colloquialism?’

He always does all his buttons, pulls his zips all the way up.

She strips out of her flight suit while he fastens his and walks past him to stand in the middle of the thing that she thinks always looks like it wants to eat her. ‘Second setting,’ she says. ‘Fine. Let’s do this.’

‘As you like,’ he says. He touches the control panel and the petals start to rise toward her.

‘I’m not going to enjoy this, am I,’ she says, watching them come.

He says, ‘Likely not. But neither will you having packing foam in your hair anymore.’ His small, close-mouthed smile is the last thing she sees before the petals seal shut around her, suction in on her, and she – as Charlie would have said – flips out.

 

He stays, calmly talking her through claustrophobia and the tiny invisible suckers vacuuming her skin away. He leaves after the starfish loosens its grip, but before she gets out, because she asks him to. Charlie wouldn’t have done any of those things. He would have left her to hyperventilate on her own, then laughed at her later after she punched him. He was like that sometimes, as uncomplicated as a kid pulling pigtails, sticking a garden snake in the face of his crush before running away.

Uncomplicated in that, ‘Hey, I like your shoes, let’s have sex,’ way, and he made things that uncomplicated, that easy for her. Possibly he made them too easy, but back then easy was what she believed she wanted.

They shared a dig, shared interests and laughter and sometimes a beer in the long evenings when you could either rehash whatever the dead taught you that day, or try to learn something new from the person living one tent over. That kind of sharing _was_ easy, and Charlie was better at it than most. He made friendship simple and obvious, the way it hadn’t been since she’d landed in Britain at thirteen, a new-made orphan and an alien in her own country. He made her feel she still belonged among the living as well as the dead.

Western culture, customs and beliefs felt cold and backward and counterintuitive to her thirteen year old self. Twelve years later they still felt that way to the adult she’d supposedly grown into. Then Charlie Holloway spilled his beer on her jeans and spilled himself into her lap. He laughed at her and kissed her and he made _her_ laugh. He made her warm and he made her want; he was the first to make her want enough to do something about it.

He used to tease her. ‘You’d still be a virgin if I hadn’t dumped that beer all over you,’ he’d say for years after, as obvious in his cruelty as he’d been in his interest, and she’d laugh with him, even as she thought that he was right.

David doesn’t laugh at or with her. Not out loud. He isn’t obvious about anything, not his interest or his cruelty, although he can be both interested and cruel, sometimes at once. He’s anything but easy. He’s nothing like obvious. His cues are off, physically and verbally, and she’s been hearing, reading him wrong for too long.

She’s fallen into the trap of forgetting that he isn’t like her (like Charlie) that what he perceives isn’t necessarily what she believes she shows him and now she’s standing in the middle looking back at a beginning she didn’t know was a beginning. She doesn’t know what he saw, what he sees now, but her diaphragm twinges when he says Elizabeth instead of Shaw. The back of her throat clenches when his fingers touch her arm or her shoulder.

Her gut upends when she follows him through corridors like cathedral arches toward whatever new thing he intends to show her. She always tells him, ‘You go first. I’ll watch.’

She trips and he catches her. Her hand lands on fabric over flesh that’s as real as humans could make it and the deck grows stable again under her boots. His arm goes away from her waist. Her hand drops from his shoulder. She looks up at him and she thinks _I didn’t_. She thinks _he let go_.

She thinks _I didn’t move_.

 

Ship’s night. Her night, now. Dark green moss covers her body and the sleeping platform’s underpinning seethes, pushing her higher, suspending her between the deck and the closed ports. She breathes against the plate, a single low note, and the heavens open up above her.

She stares until her eyes hurt. Until she feels she’s really out there, floating between stars, weightless and without care. She remembers Dad telling her to take care, to be more careful of her joy. He took joy in his life, in her and in Mum, and daily in his God. He saw God in everyday things like the smell of the land after a good rain. He saw him in fresh cut grass and a child’s cut knees bandaged and cleaned, in tears wiped carefully away.

She saw God in caves and on clay and stone and bronze tablets. She saw him carved into the sides of ancient monuments and standing stones stood up by man as impotent guardians against the passing ages. It was easy to see God within the sprawling context of history. It’s so bloody easy to see Him out here in the midst of His continuing act of creation, this great, impossible galaxy.

_Who made them?_

Charlie didn’t believe in her God, but neither did he try to tear down her belief. He argued around her and over her—sometimes up under her—but he was a scientist as well as a kind of cheerful agnostic, willing to believe if given incontrovertible proof. He didn’t think they’d find God on LV-223, but he wasn’t going to rule it out.

She doesn’t know what David believes, or what she should believe in the face of his existence. The sheer fact of his existence turns the ultimate existential question back on humanity. She thinks David has always understood that.

Engineers made us. We made him. They decided to destroy us. Is our destruction their right, as our creators? Do we, do I then have the right to destroy him?

He caught her today, and she didn’t flinch. She didn’t move away until he let her go.

 

It’s such a small thing after everything that went before. She picks up the wrong tool by the wrong edge and drops it as fast as she lifted it, hissing as the blood wells up. She raises her finger to her mouth – automatic, instinctual reaction to getting cut – but the welling drop is too thick: it’s already falling.

She sticks her finger in her mouth as her blood hits the floor and… hisses, bubbling gently. And her blood is on her tongue and it’s on the deck and the deck is eroding and her tongue isn’t.

She looks up and he’s watching her and there is no surprise, no shock. She feels nothing. Until he tells her otherwise she is nothing.

‘What did you do to me?’

He says, ‘I did what was necessary.’ He says, ‘You would have died.’

She says, ‘Everyone dies.’

He says nothing and she looks down at her hand. The cut is gone.

 

She wants to cut her hair. There are no mirrors, not of their making, but he detached the rear view on the ATV for her some time ago and when she looks into it she sees years that didn’t pass and hair that should be longer.

She doesn’t need to cut it. Stasis arrests growth everywhere; even her nails are the length she remembers.

She should be able to see it, shouldn’t she? What he did to her, what she’s become. There are still twenty-three freckles sprayed across her nose and cheeks; it should be there mixed in with them, some new colour rising beneath her skin. She holds her breath, holds it until her lungs ache and she can’t hear anything but her blood boiling in her ears and her face is stained red with everything she feels and is. Their blank slate.

She was their made thing and now she's his, and she can't see His hand in this anywhere.

 

She looks for a long time at the holographic image revolving in place above the dais and then she turns and leaves the bridge. She walks normally, not fast or slow. She knows these corridors with her mind and her palms and her knees; she’s crawled their length and walked their breadth and the way back to the cabin is an afterthought now, nearly an instinct.

Not a comfort. She’s lost touch with that word and its meaning, can’t remember what it feels like. She’s sure, though, that comfort is not this. It’s not the cool slick of the port under her palm and the distant clusters of lights that are nothing like stars.

It’s beautiful, she supposes, this ring of light they created and flung out to circle a planet that looks half the size of the station in orbit around it. In the centre of the ring something pulses; they’re not close enough that she can see the actual shape with her naked eyes, but he showed it to her on the bridge – a reactor like a small sun pulsing blue white within its contained energy sphere.

‘There are no internal life signs,’ he’d said. ‘But the pods can be configured to read as inert.’

There’s some sound caught in her throat that she doesn’t want to hear. She presses her palms flat against the port and leans in and it’s so cool against her skin, she wants to stay as she is for a long time, cooling skin and fogged breath, watching their ring of light get brighter and brighter. She presses her mouth to her hand, bites her sound soundlessly into her skin; she’s so quiet the sound of the door sliding open is almost overloud.

‘Shaw? Are you well?’

Well. Is she _well_? She swallows a laugh she’s sure wouldn’t sound like laughter. She pushes herself out and up and opens her eyes and he’s both behind and in front of her, reflected in the port’s clear surface. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

He says, ‘I did.’ He says, ‘We’ll dock at sixteen-thirty hours,’ as though hours still have some meaning for them. He stands in the port with the light from the corridor dim behind him, but she doesn’t turn and she doesn’t say anything else. Eventually he says, ‘I’d like to show you something. Will you come with me?’

 

He takes her down to the engine room and the dark, seething walls move under her hands, warm and liquid and alive. The crystal array throbs in time with the dull thrum of the engines, and his face is transformed, lost in distorted pulses of green light.  
She thinks he isn’t David 8 anymore and she thinks she doesn’t yet understand who he’s become. She thinks by now Charlie would be someone else as well. She wonders if they’d recognise each other.

She thinks _how far are you willing to go, Dr Elizabeth Shaw?_

She thinks _he speaks to the ship in its own language._

She thinks of how his hands feel on her skin, of how they look moving across the ship’s instrument panels, and then (something) thinks _exactly how human are you anymore?_

David looks at her with clear eyes (no black red green) and says, ‘I find the fluctuations quite interesting. They’re not to your taste?’

He doesn’t ask her why she laughs until her eyes are streaming and her scar feels like it’s about to come apart and she’s bowed down to the deck, but he puts his arm around her waist and holds on. He holds her steady until she wants to stand on her own again.

 

The viewports are closed. She can’t lie with her hands dug deep into the moss and watch her stars disappear so she curls her fingers into it and listens and she hears things, mechanical clicks and whines, deep groaning mechanisms moving out in space where there is no sound. The ship shudders around her and she shudders inside of it and this is what she wanted, this is where she stops moving.

The ship isn’t moving anymore. The silence inside of it is so damn loud she almost gets up and goes to find him. She grabs instead, kneading and pulling at the moss until it stops trying to grow and lets go of her.

 

‘You don't have your helmet.’

She strokes the cross, smooths her thumb across the ring's rounded edges and then she lets them both fall, lets them settle back into the hollow of her throat. She zips the suit – patched in multiple places, sometimes correctly, sometimes badly, sometimes with duct tape – up all the way to her chin and looks at him. He’s not wearing one either. ‘You ran the internal scans. Do I need it?’ He blinks and she thinks _why does he do that?_ He can’t need to.

The airlock cycles, cycles, blue red green and back again and… stops. Stale air escapes, hissing out as the hatch unseals.

She says, ‘I should have brought the axe.’

He says, ‘Very likely.’

The hatch swings toward them.


End file.
